1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Latitude Learning, Saline, Michigan

Latitude Learning is an open source, performance-driven software as a service (SaaS) learning management system (LMS) designed to assist training firms, middle-market companies, Fortune 1000 enterprises, and non-profit organizations.  >>>

For-Profit Education Sector Reporting Massive Enrollment Drop

The for-profit educational sector has had a tough year with the tightening of government scrutiny of loan default rates, media publicity highlighting poor education, and tighter controls being levied by the Department of Education for federal student aid. All of these measures have impacted student enrollments. Earlier last week, education institutes revealed their winter enrollment statistics, and the numbers were gloomy. Strayer Education reported a 20% drop in winter enrollment, DeVry a 5% drop, and Apollo a 3.8% drop in degreed enrollment. Even the S&P 1500 Education Services subindex fell significantly in the past year. After having touched a 52-week high of $139.10 in April of last year, the index dropped to $81.04.

>>>

Entrepreneurship Education: Youth Entrepreneurship Course

As a follow-up to my previous post, The Time Has Come For The College Entrepreneur, a question that begs to be answered is: What is the composition of a youth entrepreneurship course? What are the assumptions that need to be made about what students know?

Of course, one of the assumptions needs to be that the student has no business background or business training. Typically, they come from other streams of study and need to take entrepreneurship as a supplemental course.

In addition, give the job prospects, we have to also keep in mind the cost of education. It’s not reasonable to expect a large number of our unemployed youth to go to expensive business school programs and be saddled with large debt burdens. Entrepreneurship education needs to be imparted quickly, efficiently, and at a minimum cost. Ideally, it’s on a live project – a company – a venture – that the student has already started tinkering with.

I have tried to keep these criteria in mind as I have designed the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) program.

I am also curious to hear from educators at high schools and colleges who are coaching and mentoring students facing this deep recession on what, if anything, you are doing to steer them toward entrepreneurship.

Havoc In The For-Profit University Sector

For-profit educational institutions are under tighter scrutiny with Senate and House committees examining their admission process, which seems to mislead applicants, targets veterans and registers student default rates at least double those of traditional universities. According to a Congressional report released earlier this month, for-profit colleges have high dropout rates, poor results, and high loan default rates. At four of the five for-profit colleges studied by the report, 24% of students defaulted on their loans, compared with the national rate of 7% of students defaulting on government loans in 2008. Another equally disturbing report was released by the Education Trust, which cites statistics detailing poor education scores of for-profit institutions. According to the report, a mere 22% of students earn their degrees in six years in a for-profit college compared with 55% of students in public and 65% in private nonprofit colleges and universities. Apollo Group’s University of Phoenix fared the worst with a mere 9% six-year graduation rate. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Reed Sheard, CIO Of Westmont College (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: What about higher education–specific vendors?

RS: I would put Apple in there. Apple would count as an education-specific vendor.

SM: How so? Do they have specific offerings for higher education?

RS: Every other year, Apple organizes a conference for CIOs in higher education. They have account executives who are focused only on higher education. Apple also has pricing models that are beneficial to the higher education sector. These are some of the things they do, and our Apple user base in higher education in general qualifies them as a vendor. This is a pretty significant shift to the Apple platform across higher education that has created an interesting and creative dynamic. This is an interesting dialogue happening among colleges and universities. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Reed Sheard, CIO Of Westmont College (Part 5)

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Reed Sheard, CIO Of Westmont College (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: What e-mail system did Westmont College use before IT started exploring cloud-based solutions?

RS: We were using Postfix. It is an open source–based product, but our e-mail scale had grown so dramatically over the years and the storage behind it was getting problematic. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Reed Sheard, CIO Of Westmont College (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

In the multibillion-dollar market of higher education in the United States, we see an interesting trend whereby a combination of IT people and college communities are playing the role of an active “lead user” and using the cloud computing paradigm to make campus life simpler and information accessible for students through handheld devices. In this interview, we have some insights for you on evolutionary application integrations happening at Westmont and in higher education, from dispensing efficient IT infrastructure for effective collaboration to simplifying campus processes and other real-world tasks. During the interview, Sramana and Dr. Reed Sheard, VP and CIO of Westmont University College, discuss how Sheard has deployed cloud computing technologies and solutions to help the Westmont IT user community move to a higher level of service and helped the college IT team evolve to the next level in terms of business alignment. It is interesting to note that there has been explosive growth in the number of Apple devices in the higher education world, with applications taking a lead in terms of the user base compared to pure browser-based or Internet applications and the absence of Amazon’s Kindle, which is positioned as the textbook of the future in higher education but still needs a volume of textbooks to be made available on it and still lacks the ease with which iPad users can make notes and collaborate. >>>